Books in the SpringerBriefs in Psychology series

Evolutionary psychology has recently made inroads in clinical psychology, bringing the understanding that, in some cases, mental symptoms are not manifestations of brain disorders, but rather evolved mechanisms that might function in overdrive or signal fitness problems.

This Brief brings together empirical accounts that contribute to the investigation of the cultural phenomena of deep personal experiences.

This brief examines the U.S. foster care system and seeks to explain why the foster care system functions as it does and how it can be improved to serve the best interest of children. It defines and evaluates key challenges that undermine child safety and well-being in the current foster care system. Chapters highlight the competing values and priorities of the system as well as the pros and cons for the use of foster care. In addition, chapters assess whether the performance objectives in which states are evaluated by the federal government are sufficient to achieve positive health and well-being outcomes for children who experience foster care. Finally, it offers recommendations for improving the system and maximizing positive outcomes.Topics featured in this brief include: Legal aspects of removal and placement of children in foster care.The effectiveness of prior efforts to reform foster care.The regulation and quality of fosterhomes.Support for youth aging out of the foster care system.Racial and ethnic disparities in the foster care system.Foster Care and the Best Interests of the Child is a must-have resource for policy makers and related professionals, graduate students, and researchers in child and school psychology, family studies, public health, social work, law/criminal justice, and sociology.

This SpringerBrief provides an interdisciplinary synthesis based on psychology, logic, mathematics, cognitive science, and the history of science.

This brief highlights several of the most pressing challenges in addressing the needs of families who are experiencing homelessness and presents a set of strong policy recommendations for assessment, intervention, research, and service delivery related to homeless children and their parents.

Because jails in the United States handle more admissions per year than prisons - and studies of jailed parents and their children are not common in the literature - two of the three studies presented focus on jails.

Findings clarify or replace popularly held ideas about the psychology of partners of child molesters, and of the abusers themselves, in key areas such as childhood experience of sexual abuse and the construction of elaborate fictions to cover the abuse.

This forward-looking monograph distills the current knowledge base on lethal school shootings for school professionals invested in improving school safety.

This brief presents an overview of Gregory BatesonΓÇÖs Constructivist method of Cognition. Bateson proposes a theory of cognition that is based on the abstract notion of difference that the mind distinguishes and perceives and represents information that constitutes and separates how different states are ordered, grouped, and classified. Bateson, however, does not clearly indicate how a cognitive system can develop a knowledge of reality from the perception of these differences. This book seeks to offer a scientific approach to Constructivism. Using BatesonΓÇÖs hypothesis, chapters discuss how our mind distinguishes and elaborates differences, allowing us to form perceptions of objects, and how these objects can be described and compared. Chapters also discuss how from differences, it is possible to construct concepts or ideas of how these can be defined and how to derive from these differences the meanings of the signs used for the structuring of languages.  The brief offers a coherent structure of propositions that form an interpretative theory of the modus operandi of the human mind, which will be useful not only in shedding light on our cognitive processes, but also in laying the formal groundwork for artificial intelligence.Constructing Reality is a must-have resource for researchers and students of the cognitive sciences, as well as education sciences, and researchers and scholars of artificial intelligence, learning theory, and intelligent automata programming.

This book is a theoretical account for general psychology of how human beings meaningfully relate with their bodies-- from the basic physiological processes upwards to the highest psychological functions of religiosity, ethical reasoning, and devotional practices.

This brief sets out on a course to distinguish three main kinds of thought that underlie scientific thinking. Current science has not agreed on an understanding of what exactly the aim of science actually is, how to understand scientific knowledge, and how such knowledge can be achieved.